On Friday, 23 July 2010, at 17:48:57 (+1000),
Chris Samuel wrote:
> My main worry is that without nightly snapshots with those generated
> files in them it becomes even harder to get people to test recent
> changes as to test they'll go have to go through the pain of trying
> to get a current version of autoconf, automake, etc working.
>> I agree that they ideally they shouldn't be there, but we need to
> have something regularly produced that does have them for ease of
> testing.
I haven't checked, but it would be my hope that all snapshots would be
produced the same way a release would (should?) be produced:
./configure && make distcheck
Many projects have an "autogen.sh" script which does some variation of
the following:
libtoolize -c -f && aclocal && autoconf && autoheader && automake -a -c && ./configure "$@"
Or, for more modern autotools collections:
autoreconf -i -s && ./configure "$@"
In those cases, the snapshot command simply becomes ./autogen.sh &&
make distcheck. Even without the script, autoreconf is still only one
additional command, and it only has to be run by the person or script
actually generating the snapshot, not by the user downloading the
snapshot.
No tarball, snapshot or otherwise, should ever be produced without
containing the configure and Makefile.in files, libtool and
ltmain.sh scripts, aclocal.m4, config.h.in, etc. We're strictly
talking about what the repository itself contains.
Michael
--
Michael Jennings <mej at lbl.gov>
Linux Systems and Cluster Engineer
High-Performance Computing Services
Bldg 50B-3209E W: 510-495-2687
MS 050C-3396 F: 510-486-8615